Painted Cliffs Rest Area (Lupton, AZ)

Roadside Americana

Step inside and you can stand with one foot in Arizona and one in New Mexico — the state line runs straight through the floor of a Navajo-family-owned trading post built into the base of the Painted Cliffs, turquoise cases on one side, sandstone bluffs looming outside.

Outdoors

More than 300 Ancestral Puebloan sites — pit houses and four 14th-century pueblos — sit on a mile of ground just north of Winslow, excavated enough to walk a sidewalk through Homolovi II's plaza while Hopi families who trace ancestry to these exact rooms still visit today.

Roadside Americana

A 1930 steel deck-truss bridge still spans Querino Canyon on a since-bypassed stretch of old Route 66, four miles southwest of Houck — the highway's 1947 realignment stranded it in place, so it's sat here quietly earning National Register status while I-40 traffic roars past a few hundred yards north.